Review: 'Terror and Consent' by Philip Bobbitt

BY CRAIG SELIGMAN | Bloomberg News

April 20, 2008

TERROR AND CONSENT: The Wars for the 21st Century, by Philip Bobbitt. Knopf, 672 pp., $35.

'We should make no mistake," Philip Bobbitt writes in "Terror and Consent," his magisterial analysis of the long struggle civilization is facing: "This is war." From this single, salient point, the rest of his complex argument grows.

Bobbitt is a professor of law at Columbia, senior fellow at the University of Texas and a sometime government official who is best known for his 2002 book, "The Shield of Achilles." He begins by surveying the history of terrorism from the Renaissance on, showing how it has always reflected the polity it sought to undermine and so has evolved with the evolving organization of states. He ends with sweeping recommendations for confronting the market-state terrorism of the 21st century, of which al-Qaida, he thinks, is only a harbinger. "There is in my book, it seems, something to offend everyone," he says at the end.

Civil libertarians will blanch at his support for increased government surveillance - for the provisions of the Patriot Act and for warrantless wiretapping. ("Inconvenience and annoyance occasioned by more rigorous law enforcement are to be distinguished from realistic constitutional concerns about government intrusion.")

Conservatives will loathe his stress on the indispensability of alliances and on adherence to laws more rigorous than a presidential declaration of "L'etat, c'est moi." ("The administration desperately needs to rely on law because this reliance gives legitimacy to its actions.")

Leftists may reject his notion that "preclusion" - including preemptive war - must become a primary strategy in the coming conflicts. Addressing the war in Iraq, he writes that emphasis on the missing weapons of mass destruction "trivializes" the invasion, since eventually Saddam Hussein was going to have them - and use them or sell them.

As for officials of the Bush administration, Bobbitt doesn't come right out and call them cretins or imbeciles. He doesn't have to. He sees Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as only the most crippling of the body blows they've dealt American moral prestige in an era when the media plays the No. 1 role in shaping the appearance of legitimacy.

As for George W. Bush's commitment to the "war on terror," a leader who truly believed we were at war, Bobbitt scoffs, "would surely have raised taxes (not significantly lowered them), brought Democrats into the cabinet, enlarged the army, and ardently sought American alliances abroad. These steps have invariably characterized the measures taken by U.S. presidents who have led the U.S. in war since 1917."

And so Bobbitt proclaims, "I believe that almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st century terrorism ... is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought." Which is what he does in more than 500 pages of historically informed, meticulously argued and impassioned text.

He makes the case for jettisoning restrictions on information-sharing between government agencies and on warrantless e-mail and phone intercepts (which could feasibly have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe) and for adopting more forceful anti-terrorist laws, since to wait for an emergency to do our rethinking is practically to invite the imposition of martial law.

In the book's most hair-raising section, he envisions four catastrophic scenarios: 1) a conflagration in the Capitol during the State of the Union address; 2) a biological attack with the Spanish influenza virus; 3) an earthquake in California, followed by an organized reign of terror; 4) a leftover Soviet ICBM launched by a terrorist group. He doesn't even try to sketch the disaster that's always at the forefront of his fears: a terrorist attack utilizing nuclear weapons.

"One may question whether we have been well served either by the government that aggressively overreached or by the civil liberties lobby that appears to be in a state of denial about the global terrorist threat," Bobbitt writes with barely contained exasperation. You can disagree with any number of his ideas (starting with Iraq) and still recognize that "important" barely begins to characterize this book. Is it convincing enough to prompt either side to shift its thinking?